A discussion with a friend reminded me of some G Gundam backstory that can be found in the Round 4 CD soundtrack booklet. According to said booklet, Gundam in FC stands for Govern of Universe Nation Decide Advanced Mobile-suit. Interesting little tidbit and one I haven't come across elsewhere.

In fact there's quite a bit of backstory covered including Gundam Fight origin and history and details on Gundarium armour and Mobile Trace Suits. Any fine Japanese speaking folks interested to take a look to see if there's any other rare gems?

The first time I was exposed to acronyms in Gundam was actually Turn-A myself, with "Flexible Ladder Actuator Technology" and "Strike Unit for Maneuver Operations".
But it's kind of interesting that "GUNDAM" has been an acronym going that far back; I'm not at all surprised; As much as I like Seed, there was extremely little, if anything it did that was truly original.

"You can learn all the math in the 'verse, but take a boat in the air you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turn of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she ought to fall down. Tells you she's hurting before she keens. Makes her a home."

The G Gundam acronym kind of makes sense (the second one, not the "original" one), because these are custom built machines for a specific purpose: it makes a certain amount of sense that they'd have a name that defined them and their role to a certain degree. The Gundam Wing one is just… yikes. And my complain about SEED's usage of Gundam was that it was the name for several different operating systems, and only a handful of "Gundams" were called that. I can understand out-of-universe branding and all that, but are all the GUNDAM OS' variations on the original system and they're just called that for simplicity's sake? There doesn't seem to be a logical reasoning for the term continuing to exist for long.

"WE ARE THE HARO. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE." - Ascension
"Sucks to be you. Sucks to be you." - Haro
"My godlike powers must be getting rusty." - Graham

It's a UC acronym, and the "ARMOUR" in "Mobile Armour" stood for "All Range Maneuverability Offense Utility Reinforcement." GUNDAM, meanwhile, stood for "Generalpurpose Utility Non Discontinuity Augmentation Maneuvering" with WEAPON SYSTEM tacked on at the end.

Someone must've been a fan of the "pick 'em out of a hat" method of nomenclature.

Ugh. That's pretty bad.

Warning, gonna get slightly ranty, but hey, it's all in good fun.

I wish that they'd just stuck with the original explanation for all these terms, in which the names were chosen becuase they sounded cool. In a world where they're perfectly okay with nonsense-sounding mobile suit names and characters named after body parts, isn't it odd that the recton machine seems to have an obsession with coming up with ways to completely butcher the least-nonsensical terms?

Gundam is straightforward. A mobile suit wielding a gun that was powerful enough to hold back waves of enemies. Like a dam. All this "justification" for the name as time goes on is just producing some damn hilariously-hamfisted technobabble.

Half the time these gratiutous retcons just serve to futher confuse matters rather than illuminate them. In particular, I hate the awkward MOBILE SUIT retcon. They need to stop handing these to people with an acronym fetish and only a limited understanding of english technical terms. Especially when the term "Mobile Suit" isn't a very hard one to swallow even for native english speakers.

I was flipping through the CGI art softcover book, Master Archive Mobile Suit, the one on the RX-78 series. Ugh, they tried to retcon the presence of the U.N.T. Spacy designation in the OVAs by turning the whole thing into an acronym.

Unified Nuclear Team - Super Primal Aviation Construction Yard.

While most of that makes sense, what the hell kind of term is Super Primal in relation to mobile suit or battleship construction? The approach to trying to explain things with acronyms is getting old. As for if they had a writer who knew the English language better? Probably would have come up with something easier to stomach.

Could have easily retconned U.N.T. Spacy into the canon without having to turn it into an acronym. Most informed fans know that it's "United Nations Troops", and that spacy is a neologistic term for a space navy. For example, a less awkward way to add it in would be to say that this was the former name of the EFSF in some past decade, and that for whatever reason (buearacracy, tradition, whatever) some ships and MS teams still carried that designation somewhere on their hulls.

Or hell, they could have even made things simpler and retconned U.N.T. only and left Spacy alone, because that's an established term for a space force from Macross. That would have removed the mention of the UN and actually avoided having to explain "Super Primal".

But asking the writers to adhere to simple and logical retcons would be too much, right? I mean, without this dedication to sheer nonsense, we wouldn't have Kira Yamato trying to "correct for coriolis deviation", among other gems. XD

Going by MG WZC's maunal, it is manipulatable instead of manipulative and this is one of the acronyms that actually make some sense.

Explaination for the terms from the manual:
Manipulatable, Order - the machine has movable limbs that can be controlled by human.
Build, Industrial Labors- describe the machine's uses.
Extended suit- extended version of current existing space suit(or something like that)